I joke that cancer, especially chemotherapy, was so bad I wrote poetry.
This poem is the final of what ended up being a series of five.
This was written after my last session of chemotherapy.
I sit,
Between worlds,
Holding space
Balancing persistence and patience.
Breathing through the pain and the fear.
It’s liminal,
It’s raw.
Like my scars.
It’s visceral,
Uncomfortable, confronting,
Like my bald head
My weird chemical smell,
My sickness.
I drift a little
A somewhat diminished reverant
Of my former self..
I disassociate.
I am untethered from what came before.
It doesn’t seem to matter now.
The Dumpster Fire of Cancer
Has been followed
With Fire Therapy
Backburning
Ensuring those embers;
The free ranging cancer cells
Still left in my body – don’t catch,
Don’t find a home.
Medical magicians already
Carved away tumours
In a ritual of blood, drug, and scalpels.
I sit between death and health
Next is the alchemy
Working with medicines
Endocrine therapy
Transformation
One step closer to reblooming
From reverant, from burnt out forrest,
From a Temple betrayed within
To rewinding the landscape
To Phoenixes rising from
The funeral pyre.
To walking that liminal space
Into a new life
A Third Age
Reclaiming my Self, my sovereignty,
My freedom, my world.
Standby for Act III.
Act III Beginners, stand by.
©️ Fabienne S. Morgana October 2021